A New Buffer Setting Method Based on Activity Attributes in Construction Engineering

The direct application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to construction engineering, known as Critical Chain Management and Buffer Management (CCM/BM), has recently emerged as one of the most popular approaches to schedule management. However, the existing buffer setting techniques have less aken the activity attributes into account. In this paper, we introduce the concept of structure entropy to reflect the complexity of schedule network of construction project and propose a novel method for buffer sizing based on an in-depth analysis of activity attributes. After simulation test and comparison with classical methods, the proposed method is proved to have better accuracy and effectiveness.